The Holocaust Study Tour is an educational tour that motivates and challenges students to rethink one of the most horrific events in history. Traveling through Germany, Czech Republic, and Poland, students make meaningful cultural connections to the people and nations they visit.
Read below to learn more about the trip and it's purpose.
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Sunday, April 9, 2017

Day 9 - Trsice, Czech Republic

Today we checked out of our
hotel in Olomouc and our bus took us to the small town of Trsice, population of
just under 1,000, which has become such an important and integral part of the
Holocaust Study Tour in recent years.We
first made the connection on our Holocaust Study Tour in 2008 that Olomouc and
Trsice were the towns Otto Wolf refers to in his diary which is one of the diaries
in Salvaged Pages that we all
study in our Holocaust classes.The
town of Trsice hid the family of Otto Wolf for three years during World War II,
bringing them food to their forest hideouts in the spring and summer and
sheltering them in their homes and other buildings during the winter
months.Milos Dobry, the grandfather of
Petr Papousek, who we met last night at the Jewish Community Center and head of
the Jewish Federation, first showed us the hideouts in the forest and
introduced us to the mayor of Trsice, Leona Stejskalova.

As we arrived in Trsice and
walked into the Town Hall,a former
castle dating back to the 14th century, we were greeted at the
entry, as we have always been, by Mayor Leona and her deputy mayor who offered
us the traditional Czech greeting:bread
dipped in salt. We were welcomed also by
Zedenka Ohera Calabkova [we call her
Mrs. Ohera] and her sister Ludmilla, whose family helped hide the family of
Otto Wolf, as well as several members of the Czech Scout troop we had first met
in 2012 when the forest memorial from our schools was dedicated.Every year since, Štěpán
Kouřil and
other scouts have joined us every year since, spending the entire day with us
as we explore the life of the Wolf family and the town of Trsice during the
war.

Inside the building we were
officially greeted by Mayor Leona in the Ceremonial Hall who introduced Milan
Mahdal, a middle school teacher and historian for the town. Professor Mahdal told us the story of how
residents of Trsice and Zákřov provided shelter and
assistance to the Wolf family for 3 years, at personal risk.He told us that every day they would hear on
the radio the names of people who had been arrested and shot for hiding Jews. Kamila
translated for us as he told us how difficult it was to protect the secret that
they were hiding the Wolfs.They had to
be careful walking in and out of the forest in the winter, to not leave
footprints; how difficult it was to be able to supply food for an additional
four people given the ration card system, and how sometimes the Wolf family
would develop ‘cabin fever’ and just feel that they had to venture out of their
hiding places, if only for a short time.

He then introduced Mrs. Ohera
who told her story, against translated by Kamila. Her family had provided food and shelter for
the Wolfs and she told of her memories. When the Wolf family left the Zboril family
home in late 1944 when the Nazis established an office in a house next door and
appeared on their doorstep one night, Mrs. Ohera said her family decided to
offer them shelter.Mrs. Ohera was 8
years old, her sister Ludmilla was 5, and they had a 15-month old brother.In April 1945, the Nazis started having
roundups in the area because of increased partisan activity. On the night of April 20, 1945, the Nazis
entered the area and started shooting.Mrs. Ohera’s father, who was guarding the village, was injured.There were also a couple of fires started in
the town, including one on the street where the Oheras lived.Many people went out to see what was
happening and to stop the fire, including her uncle, her future father-in-law,
and Otto Wolf.She told us how they,
along with her father and others, 19 men
in all, were then randomly arrested.The
men were all tortured, but no one gave up any information about the Wolfs in
hiding.They were then put in a shed in
a neighboring forest and burned alive.When the remains were examined later, doctors said every bone in the
bodies had been broken before death.The Soviets would build a monument at the
site of the execution and burning, to commemorate the brutality of the Nazis. While telling her story, Mrs. Ohera had become
quite emotional as these difficult childhood memories of pain and fear and
losscame flooding back, and she ended
her story by saying “There’s nothing left to say . except that such things
should never happen again.So me, my
sister, my little brother and I stayed alone with my mom.It was very difficult.”

Professor Mahdal then talked
about how on May 8th the Wolf family met soldiers from the Soviet
Red Army who liberated the area, an how within one day of their liberation,
learned the fate of their two sons, Otto, and Kurt, who had joined the Soviet
army to the east before the Wolf family had gone into hiding and who had been
killed in battle.The Wolf family, who
had been living in Olomouc when they received their deportation notices, then
fleeing to Trsice to hide, returned to the town of Olomouc.

The local people felt no need
to talk about what had transpired with the Wolf family and the rescue efforts
of the townspeople for more than 40 years.Shortly after the war, Mrs. Wolf died and Mr. Wolf later remarried.After his death, his second wife gave Otto’s
diary to the local Jewish community, but because Czechoslovakia was then under
communism, nothing was done with the diary.After the Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism in 1989, the diary
of Otto Wolf was published and people started to ask questions about what had
happened here and why the town of Trsice had protected this Jewish family.He also mentioned, as we had heard before,
that Holocaust survivors often did not share their experiences with their
children, perhaps to protect them, but that they were usually more open about
their life during the Holocaust with their grandchildren. He also said that
Europeans were often more willing to talk about the Holocaust because they were
more aware that it could happen again in different circumstances, and people
need to be vigilant.This reminded us
that Shalmi had also said that Americans
were more innocent in that they had not experienced war to the degree of the
European nations and were, therefore, often more naïve.

We took a group picture
before the town’s symbol, the frog, Why
a frog?Because the name of the man who
originally settled here translates as Mr. Frog.We then visited the memorial in the small town park which was dedicated
in 2013 to the rescuers of the Wolf family and the town in general, by the U.S.
Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. The three paragraphs on the memorial gave the
history of the town’s protection of the Wolf family, the names of specific
rescuers, who were later all given Righteous Gentile status by Yad Vashem, as
well as a memorial to a Jewish family from Trsice, the Kornbluh family who were
deported to Terezin in June 1942 and then in August, sent east on a transport
to Riga, Lithuania where they were murdered.

We next walked to the town
cemetery, marked by one of the 5 information guide markers which are placed at
sites around Trsice which relate to the Wolf family.We saw the memorial to the 19 men from Trsice
and Zakrov, including Otto Wolf, who had been killed in April 1945, as well as
the gravesite of Jaroslav [Zladek] Zdarilova who had had a crush on Otto’s
sister, Lici, and was one of the first to help hide and protect the Wolf
family.

After
a wonderful lunch with Mayor Leona, the Deputy Mayor, Professor Mahdal, Mrs.
Ohera and her sister Ludmilla, and the Czech scouts, we climbed on the bus to
take us to the entrance to the forest to visit the memorial at the hideouts. Arriving at the memorial we had the chance to
imagine the conditions in which the Wolf family had to survive by surveiling
the forest surroundings.

We
hiked back out of the forest, said goodbye to our Trsice friends and got on the
bus for a four hour ride to our next stop, Dabrowa Tarnowska in Poland.Tonight we will be having dinner in our hotel
with the three teachers we met several
years ago who helped restore a Jewish synagogue as an educational center.Tomorrow we will be spending time at the high
school and synagogue with the teachers and students from the school.

As we were leaving Trisce we noticed a group of bikers who stopped at one of the sign posts that our group was instrumental in establishing back in 2013 which described the events which had occurred in Trsice and Zakrov during the war. We were very pleased to see that people were taking the time to stop at these signposts and perhaps learn, for the first time, this history.

6 comments:

I have heard about families hiding Jews in the Holocaust, but they had to keep it a secret because of other neighbors or onlookers reporting them to the Nazis. It was interesting to read that an entire town had helped to protect the Jewish family. Citizens must have had a tight bond withe the family and each other to have the audacity to hide the Wolfs.

The forrest time very much reminds me of the story of the Bielski partisans, two Jewish brothers who saved thousands of refugee Jews by hiding them out in the forest. By utilizing the natural resources, the brothers built, oversaw and protected a society hidden away in the forrest nearby to keep from Nazi dangers. At one point, one of the brothers went off to fight with the rebel sources and later came back with these forces to save the forest colony when it was found and being attacked. The courage and ingenuity of these brothers saved so many.